


When the Sun Goes Down

by specialrhino



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-11
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-11-25 02:31:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/634171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/specialrhino/pseuds/specialrhino
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Belle in Wonderland.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Sun Goes Down

**Author's Note:**

> This was for the ouat-exchange at livejournal. :)
> 
> Endless thanks to glovered, without whom this story would have no conflict and possibly no introspection and to subwaycars, without whom this story would be a) 3k shorter, b) full of BLAHs and c) completely without description. 
> 
> I made up a name for Belle’s kingdom, just because.

Belle walked away from Rumplestilstkin’s castle and tried not to look back over her shoulder. It had been her home for months but she would never see it again. It’s what was best for her, but she still felt terrible about it. She straightened her shoulders. Good riddance, she thought. She imagined each crunch of snow under her impractical heels was her crushing each of her regrets. Maybe if she had said this, what if she had done that. No matter how much you try to help someone, she reminded herself, it won’t work unless they want to help themselves.

Eventually, she reached the edge of the woods with no plan beyond a vague goal to not run into any more overly familiar royalty - Rumplestiltskin had filled her in on the identity of her last mystery companion and she realized she’d got off lightly for having a chat with someone so terrible her subjects called her the “Evil Queen.” She wanted to get her head sorted before she returned home to Oraia. Maybe that was being cruel to father, but no one was expecting her return, and there were a few lands she had read about as a child that she’d always longed to see. This was her chance to see the world like she’d always dreamed.

She got two hours into the woods unmolested before a waiflike man in an aggressively flagellated black helmet emerged from the path that joined hers. Belle paused mid-step, looking for someplace to hide before he spotted her. She wasn’t in the mood to deal with anyone. It was too late for that though. Before she could move the man had turned her way. He manoeuvered his horse to block the path and dismounted with a flourish.

“What is your destination, my lady?” he asked. “The road is long and it grows dark.” The inflection of his voice was lively, but everything else about him felt off, somehow. Dull and lifeless. “Please, let me escort you on horseback.”

Belle did not think she could trust this man. She smiled to cover her discomfort and said, “That’s very kind of you, but I don’t have very far to go. My family’s house is a twenty minute walk from here.”

The man frowned at her, and Belle did her best not to step back. Showing any sort of fear would not be wise. Before she could say or do anything though, or even think of away to escape, she heard footsteps behind her. She didn’t have time to turn around. Suddenly, there was a sharp pain at the back of her head, and she fell to the ground.

She glanced up to see whoever it was that had snuck up on her. Peering down at her was the smirking face of the Queen. Everything went black.

The next thing Belle knew, there were blades of grass towering over her head, blocking most of her view of a dazzling blue sky. Sunlight filtered through, warming her face, and she blinked once, then twice to clear her head. She was flat on her back in the dirt, water seeping slowly into her dress. She grimaced, staring up at the sky.

Where was she?

She sat up slowly and looked around. The forest around the Dark Castle stretched for miles and miles, and yet her view of the horizon here was largely unencumbered. There should be snow on the ground, but there wasn’t even the hint of a chill in the air. She must be very far from the castle.

Standing up was only slightly difficult. She barely wobbled at all before catching her balance. When she raised her head though, she was immediately swallowed up in a wave of smoke. She coughed. Someone was blowing smoke rings in her face.

“Whoooooo aaaarrrrreeeee youuuuuuuu?” a voice said ponderously, punctuating the question with another fluffy, white ring of smoke.

She whirled around to find that behind her was a blue caterpillar, bigger than the biggest stallion in her family’s stables, its noble bulk sprawled across an equally massive mushroom. It was quite easily the strangest thing she had ever seen. It was rude, but she couldn’t help but stare, if only for a moment.

“My name is Belle,” she said finally, trying to brush off as much mud and dust from her dress as she possibly could. She patted at her hair a bit, but at this point, it was probably a lost cause. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

The caterpillar blew another smoke ring at her. She did her best not to cough. It seemed terribly impolite. The caterpillar didn’t seem to notice or care at all.

“But who are you?” she asked after a moment, when it seemed the caterpillar was content to continue smoking in silence. She wasn’t sure if he even remembered she was there. Maybe he had gotten distracted.

Instead of answering, the caterpillar offered her his bong. A generous gesture, perhaps, but Belle doubted you could trust compounds to work the same on different species, and she herself did not fancy being blue. Or disproportionately large, for that matter.

“No thank you, I’m quite alright,” she said. Her head felt a bitstuffy and she wrinkled her nose. The caterpillar frowned down at her.

“Ssssssssuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuiiit yourselfffffff,” he said and turned away.

It was only then that she noticed, out of the very corner of her eye, the cat. It appeared to be perched on her shoulder, but she could hardly feel it at all: it was either an illusion, or weightless.

“Oh, you’re an unfamiliar face!” it said, and Belle jumped. “Are you lost? In need of a tour guide perhaps?”

Between one blink and the next it was gone. She spun around, searching for it.

It sat upon a sign not too far away. She hadn’t noticed it before, which was unlikely, given how large and bulky it was, with arrows curved and twisted and pointing all sorts of directions that made very little sense at all. The dirt around the post was upset in a way that made Belle suspect that maybe the sign hadn’t even been there at all until a moment ago, if that was possible.

“Oh, no, I’m fine, thank you,” she said. She had learned at court that it never paid to be rude to anyone, no matter what or who they appeared to be.

The cat, of course, seemed to ignore her completely. That appeared to be a new theme in Belle’s life.

“This way is up and that way is down, this way is that and that way is this,” it said, pointing all sorts of directions until its arms were all crossed and tangled. She didn’t know cats could do that sort of thing. It hopped a bit, like maybe it was dancing, before saying with a flourish of its arms, “And THIS way is to the March Hare, and THAT way is the Mad Hatter!”

She blinked as it grinned down at her, its smile as wide as her face and teeth pearly white and overly large. Clearly, the talking animals in this realm were not very helpful at all.

“Visit either you like: they're both mad,” it said and Belle shook her head. You’re all mad, she thought privately.

She looked about again, unsure of where exactly to go, but quite certain she’d like to get away from here and it’s talking caterpillars and dancing cats.

Perhaps if this had happened to her a year ago, Belle would have panicked. But she’d already decided to take a long, roundabout way back to her kingdom and family, and being just a tiny bit lost wasn’t as terrifying as it could have been. Once you steeled yourself for a lifetime of homesickness, it was apparently very easy to take a small delay in stride. This place wasn’t what she would have chosen for herself, but Belle was confident she could soon find someone reasonable to point her back to familiar lands. Belle wasn’t really in need of directions at the moment anyway; any path was as good as the next. Over the past year she’d learned that every “away” was also a “toward,” after all.

In the end, she found the path with the most shade, and began to walk.

The cat still sat perched upon the sign, watching her carefully and for the first time looking almost like a proper cat.

“Interesting choice!” it called out after her as she passed. She ignored it and continued on.

The cat was right, though. Interesting was one way to describe the path she’d taken. The road seemed to slope inward and twist outward at the same time, and things that looked endlessly far away she passed quickly, while the things that seemed so close never seemed to get any closer at all. It was all some bizarre sort of optical illusion, like the kind she used to deliberate over as a child. She glanced upward, and noticed chunks of earth floating where clouds should be. She wanted to stop and stare for a moment, but her feet kept moving onwards without her permission.

Whatever was in the air here, it was very strange indeed.

The breeze that ruffled the tops of the grass carried things she had smelled long ago, unplaceable memories that were more feelings than recollections. It was a queer mix of pleasant and utterly disconcerting, the jumbled up emotions of her childhood flickering in and out as if they were candles lining the path.

In what seemed like hardly any time at all, considering the length of the road, she came upon a long table set for tea, populated by two person-sized animals and a dramatically overdressed man who appeared to be in some sort of fugue state. The table could easily sit thirty people, and its surface was cluttered with teacups, plates of scones and jams and finger sandwiches and cakes for twice as many. No two of the chairs crowded around the table matched one another in color, shape or size, or even looked as though they would belong in the same room in a house.

She paused at mouth of the clearing, taking it all in.

Everything felt like a dream, a bit more than it had before. 

She found herself asking the man, “How could you possibly be comfortable in a scarf and coat? It is very sunny out.” It wasn't what she'd meant to say at all.

One of the animals, a hare wearing a suit jacket and tattered bowtie, answered for him. Presumably, this was the March Hare.

“The sun always shines here. And before you wonder why — it’s Wonderland. The land is here to do the wondering. But I can see that you are wandering. Go on your way, do not stop for tea.” It pointedly turned away from Belle and addressed the overdressed man to its right. “Jefferson, would you pass the sugar?”

How rude of them, Belle thought.

She took a step closer to the table, despite what the March Hare had said. She wanted to know where Wonderland was and how she’d gotten there, and since no animals around here seemed capable of giving straight answers, she was hoping another human might.

She opened her mouth to ask exactly that.

“How can the sun always be shining? Even at night?” Belle said instead. She felt very queer. She couldn’t stop saying whatever came into her head.

 

The overdressed man – Jefferson – looked up at her and laughed bitterly.

“There is no night.” He stood and stalked towards her. Belle thought it looked pretty theatrical. It matched the rest of him, except for his eyes, which were all at once wild and full of despair. Jefferson continued, checking a watch he pulled out of a cream pot on the table, “It’s time, you see? She stopped associating with me entirely.”

That sounded interesting. Belle wanted to inquire further, she was going to open her mouth and that was going to be the question that came out. “Do you always stand this close to people when you talk?” Maybe next time.

“Occupational habit, sorry,” said Jefferson, stepping back and taking his top hat off in a conciliatory gesture. “Old habits are hard to break.”

A thought struck her. Wait. Jefferson, intimidating, top hat. Mad Hatter. Jefferson of the crime syndicate. Jefferson of the Black Hat. Oh god, Belle thought, how do I always manage to get stuck in odd places with dangerous people?

“Jefferson!” Belle couldn’t help exclaiming, eyes going wide.

“As charged. And what is your name?” He didn’t look interested, exactly, but like Belle was a distraction from whatever he had been brooding on previously.

Stranded in a strange land or not, there was no way Belle was giving her real name to a member of the mob.

“Alice,” she said. “My name is Alice.”

He dipped down into a mocking sort of bow.

“Well then, Al-” An alarm clock rang in the distance. Belle looked around to see where the sound was coming from, but when she looked back, Jefferson was gone.

Belle frowned. Surely she hadn’t imagined him just then. Why would she do that? She had actually seen the Black Hat in person, once. The viscount she’d seen him talking to soon after had had to leave the court in disgrace. Maybe she wasn’t ready to let go of Rumplestiltskin. Maybe she was mad and wanted company that felt familiar, that felt like danger simmering under quiet moments. 

Before Belle had time to get into the full swing of her brooding, Jefferson reappeared as unobtrusively as he had gone, not there one moment, and then there the next. He was acting, frustratingly enough, as if nothing odd had occurred, instead frowning at his watch. He got up without once looking at her, entering the castle she suddenly noticed looming behind the tea table.

It had a distinct lack of gargoyles for a castle. Wait, no, that wasn’t what she meant to notice at all. Belle struggled to get a hold of her thoughts.

Oh, the mobster! Sure, the gossip about him had died out a few years previous, but clearly he hadn’t dropped off the face of the land. Well, he had of Fairytale Land. The question was, what was he doing here, in this strange Wonderland?

Belle, after much scrutiny, found the most comfortable looking chair – wing-backed, with a plush, red velvet cushion – at the mismatched table and settled in to think for a few hours. She did not mean to do this, of course, but there was, so far, a lack of people willing to give her any helpful advice, and while she wanted to have a good ten minute worry about this over a cup of tea, once she sat down, the trickle of random thoughts became a flood. She lost herself in her head as butterfly toast flapped about her, round and around again.

 

Belle came back to herself abruptly, The sun was hot, and a rivulet of sweat had made it’s way down her forehead and into her eye, a sudden sting that distracted her from her tumbling thoughts.

Belle looked around. The March Hare, still seated at the table, was ignoring her to sing to a slumbering Dormouse with much gusto. The force of his song was probably to compensate for the jam he had just finished putting in the Dormouse’s ears. While they were preoccupied, Belle ducked through the doorway the Black Hat had entered, however long ago.

Despite the smallness of the door, from the inside, it was a columned hall, larger than her castle back at home in Oraia, with ceilings taller than any tree she had ever seen grow. The strangest part of it all had to be the fact that the entire hall seemed to be of stacks of — hats?

They were piled all about in a jumble, as if they’d grown out of the ground like a small forest, stretching up to the ceilings and towering over her, precariously balanced. Belle wrinkled her nose, taking a slow, cautious step forward. No one appeared to be around, but the stacks were close enough together that anything could be hiding behind.

For someone who already had one powerful hat of much contested abilities, Jefferson sure had a lot of other ones. Had Belle been sent to a factory? Was this place the base of operations for a hat ring? She shook her head, hoping to clear her thoughts, which were once again running away from her in the oddest directions. Clearly she had seen one too many plays as a child.

Belle continued carefully making her way through the twisting stacks of hats, minding where she stepped and stopping to peer carefully around the particularly large piles before continuing onwards. It was a good few dozen steps before she heard or saw any sign of life at all. It was faint at first, so faint she wasn’t sure she wasn’t just hearing things, but a few steps closer and the sound was clearer. It was a crazy muttering coming from somewhere close by, past a pile of violently green hats and another squat stack of hats made of burlap.

After a few more minutes of navigating the maze of millinery, Belle finally caught a glimpse of Jefferson. He was sitting hunched over a worktable, pulling at his hair and cutting fabric. His actions looked neither voluntary nor nefarious. In fact, Jefferson made quite a pathetic picture. Belle couldn’t bear to watch. She quietly backed away, not that Jefferson was in any state to take notice of her or anything else.

She picked her way between stacks of hats, batting away feathers that stuck out at her, moving farther away from the sad scene at the table until she could no longer hear the Hatter’s crazed mumblings. Eventually she found a bit of clear floor space wide enough for her to arrange herself a crumpled heap of hats from a short stack of green fuzzy berets and blue fur caps nearby. Maybe everything would make more sense in the morning, she thought, and curled up on her makeshift bed. Well, at least 12 hours from now. Maybe she would even wake up in the woods, or at Rumplestiltskin’s, and this will all have been just a very strange, silly dream. Rumplestiltskin seemed so long ago and so far away. She could barely call to mind a picture of his face. How could that be possible? She closed her eyes against the sunlight seeping in through the stained glass far above, burrowing further into the hats surrounding her. She pulled one over to cover her face and went to sleep.

Belle awoke an unknown number of hours later, disoriented and utterly buried in hats. She blinked, blowing a feather out of her face, before struggling to properly sit up. Light streamed through the clerestory windows, stabbing into her brain. She winced and rubbed sleep from her eyes.

She struggled to her feet in the pit of hats she was lying in. She probably knocked over another stack in her sleep. After a minute or two of flailing, she finally extracted herself from the heap and enjoyed the sensation of being firmly upright. Belle wound back through the hat towers until she found the door that led back to the garden. She sat down at the March Hare’s table, ignoring its spluttered protests. She was so distracted watching his pupils roll wildly and independent of one another that she didn’t bother trying to understand the strange jumble of jibberjabbering sounds coming out of the Hare’s mouth.

Thankfully, it was still teatime. Belle ate three cakes and four crumpets and felt exactly the same as when she started. The Hare alternated between ignoring her presence and glaring. She would get up and find some other clearing to sit in, but the rest of this land was bound to be just as silly, based on what she’d seen so far, so she stayed put. There were worse places to be than at a tea table, Belle supposed.

The Dormouse, miraculously awake for once, hiccuped into its tea. It mumbled something about tea trays and bats and then slipped backwards off the stool it had ill-advisedly chosen to sit upon. Not awake, then. The March Hare reached over and deposited the Dormouse on the table, across several trays and half-full teacups. 

Eventually, the Hatter joined them, looking as morose as he had the day previous.

“Why do you always look so sad?” Belle asked. She poured herself another cup of tea.

“It’s the supplies,” said the March Hare out of the corner of his mouth, in a stage whisper he probably thought was discreet. “They run out sometimes and the Hatter has to stop, well, hatting.” He let out a crazed peal of laughter. Belle winced.

Jefferson acted as though he had heard nothing and shifted the Dormouse’s face out of a cake to stop its loud snuffling.

Belle added two lumps to her tea and gave it a stir. When she looked up, the Hatter was gone, the March Hare, too. Belle roused the Dormouse.

“Could you stop that? I was quite awake,” he said, and scampered off the table to the next seat and began to snore.

“But where did they go? People can’t just disappear,” she couldn’t help wondering aloud, tilting her head to the side. The mouse did not reply. Belle sipped at her tea.

When she looked down, a tail had appeared, snatching a biscuit from her plate. Ears and a mouth soon followed.

“Are you sure they were even there in the first place?” 

“Of course I’m sure!” said Belle, who could remember it quite clearly.

“The surer you are, surely the madder you will be,” said the cat. “It is mad to be sure in a place like this, but then the only ones that come here are madder than most!”

“I didn’t come here! I wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t been abducted by the evil queen.”

 

“What?” said a voice. Belle jerked her head round. The Dormouse was snoring away, but at a different chair, and the Hatter and Hare were restored to the table. The former was watching her intently.

“Who did you say brought you here? You’re from Fairytale Land?”

“I was kidnapped, and the last face I saw was Queen Regina’s. I still have no idea why I’m here...”

He ignored most of what she had said to ask, “Regina is alive? Did she find the fountain of youth she was looking for?” Belle thought it a very random question. Was this some sort of test?

“Why would she be dead? It’s only the 15th year of her reign.” Belle had a chilling thought. “How long have you been here?” she asked carefully.

“No, that’s impossible! It has been decades since she left me here.” The Hatter looked down at his hands, as if they could explain. A teacup dangled from his finger and poured its contents onto the lacy tablecloth. “Certainly not a year. Unless...”

His ascot changed from red to purple. The March Hare moved down a place setting. The Hatter looked up again after a minute. His face was hearbreakingly hopeful and seemed much younger. Belle blinked, and he was gone. Down at the end of the table, the March Hare was dipping the slumbering Dormouse’s hand in a pot of cream.

“Really, though, where does he keep going!” She looked over at the floating cat appendages and glared, throwing her arms up in frustration. “And, before you say it, I am not mad.”

“Well,” the cat began, materializing a paw to wave in an expository gesture. “I could tell you about light. Do you know much about light, Alice?”

“No, what does light have to do with anything,” Belle said. She carefully ignored the mocking way the cat said her name.

“Well, light goes in straight lines. If it were to bend like this,” the cat curled his tail, “we would all see things around corners. If it twisted like this,” its head spun round twice in a grotesque fashion, “we wouldn’t see anything at all! There. Now I’ve told you about light, but then again, caterpillars are very small, hats should have magic, and cats don’t talk, if you know what I mean. We’re all mad, here, love. Or are we here? You could just be mad.”

The cat laughed, a harsh sound, the rest of it’s body disappearing until it was just a floating mouth, opened wide in a grin before that too was gone, it’s laughter echoing through the garden.

Belle stayed put in her chair, more confused than she was before the cat had even appeared. If she understood the Hatter correctly, then he too was here against his will. She could have guessed that on her own- it’s not like he looked like a person on holiday- but she still couldn’t figure out quite why he was stuck here as well. Regina, of course, had to have something to do with it, but what could he have done to get on the Queen’s bad side? Had he, too, got involved with Rumplestiltskin in some way?

Was he even really here? Or was the cat right? Was she actually mad or going that way? She just couldn’t wrap her mind around any of it. There must be rules somehow. Even in a place like Wonderland, there were things that didn’t disappear, like the dormouse. And the cat, the cat had perfect control over when and where it appeared or disappeared, like some sort of fairy or god. The Mad Hatter though, the Hatter was different. He seemed to drift in and out unintentionally, like a dandelion caught in a breeze, or she thought, looking up, like the floating bits of land in the sky.

How did things even grow here? It never rained and she never once saw even the smallest of streams when she wandered her way over here. Maybe there was an underwater lake that fed the plants. Maybe the plants didn’t even need water at all. It made no sense- they were plants, of course they needed water- but really, this land was just brimming with fantastical, impossible things that made her head spin trying to reason away. Maybe there was just no reason to be had at all.

In this fashion, her thoughts drifted onward and onward without her bidding. She was getting used to the experience, the feeling of falling inward and outward all at once. It felt like she had all the time in the world.

 

 

It took a few days and fair amount of wandering before Belle felt like she had a sound enough grasp on the geography of Wonderland. If she tried to leave by the path to the left, she would end up back where she started. If she walked backwards down the path, she would end up at the caterpillar smoking hookah and the surrounding acres of disproportionately large grass. If she walked to the right, she went up into a hedge maze and ran into unfriendly soldiers painting shrubbery with brushes that were snatched up by the foliage upon contact. And if she went straight, she ended up in a red palace, where people would introduce her to food and tell her the land was a chessboard. Mostly, though, she stayed in the garden, because at least at the tea party, she was rarely bothered.

Belle only caught herself thinking of Rumpelstiltskin once in all of that time, and even then it felt like he was someone she had known long ago, or a character from a book. She couldn’t feel very much about it at all. She had steeled herself to forget about Rumpelstiltskin when he threw her out of his castle, but she did not think it possible that she could feel so little so soon. Were her emotions being muted? It didn’t feel like it. But how would she know? Sometimes Belle felt like she had less substance with each passing day. Maybe it was in her head. Or maybe bits of her were falling away and soon, she’d be another dormouse, asleep in this dream world. 

It was a chilling thought that she did her best to ignore. Whatever was happening here, it was good in some way. She had been given a chance to start over - she rarely heard of people getting past their True Love, but hers had certainly been a dead end and she wasn’t ready to resign herself to a political union upon getting home.

Wonderland was a novel experience. All of her life, Belle had had an assigned role, a purpose. Back home, she was the beloved daughter, amateur scholar and princess. At Rumple’s she had been a companion, collateral and a maid. But here, she was an alien. A prisoner, you could say. But prisoners were fed, and prisoners got a place to stay – not that either was relevant in this place – and prisoners weren’t expected to do much of anything at all.

It felt awfully weird not to eat or to rest, even if she didn’t seem to need to do either here, so she decided to stick by the Hatter and the Hare’s tea spot. It was the only place that seemed to have a chef nearby that wasn’t the Red Queen’s court, and she had her heap of hats to take naps on. Sometimes the cat would come and sing nonsense lullabies to her as she slept, almost in the same tune her mother used when she was alive. Almost, but not quite, as if tilted fifteen degrees, extra E flats in all the wrong places. She asked why E flat, once, and the cat had only replied that it was the “Eeeeeeeesiest note and it fits in eeeeeeeeeeeverywhere.” She did not dignify this with a response.

All in all, she had carved out some semblance of a strange little life here, like she’d almost figured out all the rules. Except the Mad Hatter continued to disappear and reappear as before, still without any discernable pattern.

The Mad Hatter reappeared just as Belle was walking past the tea table. His shoulders were slumped, his tea cup empty. He didn’t say a word, didn’t acknowledge Belle or the Dormouse at all, too busy staring sadly at the place setting across the table.

“Someone you left behind?” she asked before she even realised she was going to. He looked up, startled. For a moment, Belle was sure he wasn’t going to answer her, just going back to pretending she wasn’t there like he normally did, or maybe just conveniently disappearing like he’d done nearly anytime she asked him a question. She wasn’t expecting anything.

“I have a daughter,” the Hatter said, to her surprise. “I left her behind in Fairytale Land when Regina – I shouldn’t have left her. I should have– I’d promised her that I’d be home in time for tea.” 

His eyes were glassy, his smile bitter and sad. It was the most human Belle had ever seen him.Without thinking, she reached out and covered his hand with hers, squeezing it in sympathy.

A small part of her was cheered up to think that maybe he wasn’t a hallucination, after all. Why would she make up a tragic past about a crime lord? But then, a treacherous voice in her head reminded her, Rumpelstiltskin had a child. A child he was also separated from. The Hatter was a dangerous man. Dangerous and broken. Just like Rumplestiltskin. She shook her head, trying to clear those thoughts from her mind.

“It's not your fault,” she said.

He didn’t take his hand away, but he also didn’t make eye contact with her as he spoke.

“Yes, it is. And now I can never go back, not without magic in this world.”

“I’m sorry,” Belle said. “But you’ve been away a much shorter time than you thought. That’s something.”

“Yeah.” His face softened. “I feel calmer when you’re around. When you’re not – it feels like I’ve made up reasons for – when you’re not, it’s bad.”

Belle maybe understood what he meant. She squeezed his hand one more time before standing up, determine to lighten the mood.

“Look, you can’t do anything about it for now, and you’ve got a few hours before you can make more hats, so. You can loosen up a little.” He was still looking at the empty seat, at an imaginary figure whose face must have come up to just below the high back of the chair. Belle walked around the table and sat down in it.

She reached for the nearest teapot, which was spangled with yellow roses. Friendship, in the language of flowers. She could do that.

“Some tea, Ha- Jefferson?”

“Yes, thanks,” he said, lifting his glass.

“It’s funny, the last time I poured tea it was for a half crazed dark wizard. As weird as this place is, I feel like my situation has not gotten any worse.” She laughed.

“There’s no one you’d miss?”

Her smile was bitter. “There almost was, but, well, he was too much of a coward to be a part of my life,” she told her teacup.

When she looked back up, Jefferson was gone, but he reappeared five minutes later, so she counted it as a win.

Belle decided she liked the castle. This was mostly because, search as she might, she could find no dungeons. There was no one here to throw her in them, but it was comforting to know that none existed should that ever change.

After several long days of searching through the hall of hats, she managed to find a door that lead to a library. It was filled with shelves and ladders and uncomfortable looking sofas in jarringly bright candy-striped colors, but its collection of books was extensive, and all them had that typical book-smell. Most importantly, nothing in the room tried to talk to her. Sometimes she liked to just walk along the shelves, trailing her fingers over the leather and cloth-bound spines. This place was hers, and it would have felt like an intrusion to periodically be addressed by sentient drapery or a grumpy sofa. Belle was very pleased, even though she could not guess who the library was for or who had put it together. Maybe she wasn’t the first person to be stranded in these halls.

 

The downside was that once she finished a book, all of the details would leak out of her head in visible tendrils like steam out of a teapot, but it was something to do at least. She took to bringing books to the tea table to read in the intervals when the Mad Hatter disappeared midway through conversation. She wasn’t entirely certain what they talked about, either, but she was happy for the company. The March Hare and the Dormouse were essentially non-entities, as the March Hare soon stopped addressing her completely and the Dormouse was usually either singing or asleep.

Despite the weirdness of everything and the mysterious non-passage of time, she felt like she had a place here. A place that wasn’t in confinement with a dark sorcerer, that had the illusion of freedom, that felt like a nice, long, afternoon nap.

Every once in a while, the Hatter’s manic moods would flare up for a few hours. Sometimes he would forget and be frantic at his work and other times he would glance over at her and then his pocket watch consideringly, and slow down a little. Did she disappear for him, too?

It was fascinating watching him work, but also at some points nauseating. It was like the magic eye pictures her older cousins gave to her as a child. There was never any hint of what kind of hat he would make next. Sometimes halfway through cutting fabric it would change color or shape or sprout legs and wander off. The more violent materials would flicker angrily from color to color, and a sheer purple one once sprouted wings and flapped away. It got as far as the side of the table before it plummeted to the ground and lay in a drooping heap. Belle had felt sorry for it as she watched Jefferson pick it up and place it on a nascent tower of hats. Rumple probably would have cackled and burned it and called her “Dearie,” for good measure. Even among people who took the law into their own hands, Rumple was comparatively a pretty terrible person.

Belle kicked her legs against the spindly stool she was perched on.

“Can you use magic, then?” she asked. “This place seems to be full of it.”

Jefferson could work while plenty distracted, she’d found. She usually tried to avoid looking around at the evidence of how much time he’d had to practice.

“There’s no magic here, only madness. Madness and -”

“Annoying animals?”

Jefferson laughed a little. As maudlin as he could be, it was nice to have someone to talk to as an equal. Rumple had been her master even as he had been her friend, and everyone else here was very dismissive. Exhibit A: the Dormouse. 

She propped her chin up on her hand and counted his eyelashes as he worked. It’s something she used to always do with Rumple, but here it felt different, felt like it could mean something. She was here because she wanted to be, maybe not in Wonderland, but with Jefferson, and it felt like it made a world of difference. Jefferson was superficially similar to Rumplestiltskin, but he was clearly willing to give up everything for those that he loved - he had confided in her one day, about how his job had taken his wife, and how he’d immediately given it up to keep his daughter safe. Rumple had only sunk deeper and deeper into the handicap of magic as he became more miserable. She hadn’t been enough for Rumple, and she maybe wasn’t enough for Jefferson either, but at least Jefferson let her in enough to make it a little bit better. He let her be important enough for that.

She was happy.

And then one day, she was up in the library to pick out a book at random, and she felt something shake her even as she stood perfectly still. The cat, whose head and torso had been curled up on the bookshelf next to her looked up sharply. “Where are you going?” it said.

Belle was a little bit spooked. “What are you talking about” she laughed uneasily. “I’m not going any-” and then she woke up.

Jefferson pulled another pint of ice cream out of the freezer. Just another day in Storybrooke. Some more wallowing in his pain, more watching the town (his daughter) with a telescope. In some ways, it was a nice change from Wonderland – here, he could see Grace, see that she was happy, know she didn’t feel like anything was missing, didn’t know he’d abandoned her.

 

The first stretch of eternity in Wonderland had been terrible. He hadn't- there was no – it was very lucky that time was in stasis where he was, that starving or exhaustion was impossible. He would have never let himself actually die of course, not with Grace still out there, but the only thing keeping him from going totally mad had been making hats endlessly, without breaks to eat or sleep, in hopes of somehow getting back to her.

But then there was Alice. Alice, who calmed him down, who made him feel less like he was breaking to pieces, who gave him hope. Alice, who flickered in and out of reality like a faulty radio. Alice, who, search as he might, watching for endless hours on his telescope, he had never seen in Storybrooke: just a symptom of his madness after all.

What if Emma never believed? What if Regina ultimately won? The thought didn’t bear dwelling on, even if that was all he’d been doing for the last five months since his failed encounter with the town’s destined savior. He just couldn’t understand it. How could someone so bull-headed and of this world possibly save anyone?

He probably should have had a bit more faith though because eventually, the curse was broken. Good prevails, for princesses and the good people of Fairytale Land, that is. Nothing happened like it was supposed to. His Grace existed once more, but he couldn’t bear to reveal himself to her. He had betrayed her.

But of course, to his advantage this time, nothing ever worked out quite as he expected. Grace forgave him. They were a family again.

Nearly a month after the curse was broken, he took Grace to the newly opened public library.

They walked about a bit, talking about the books Grace was reading for school. This magicless land was harsh and strange, but Grace could have an education for free, and read as many books as she could find in a library. He longed to return home to Fairytale Land and their cottage, but Jefferson was delighting in the experience of giving Grace everything she wanted, and what she wanted right now was to read the next Harry Potter book. He settled her into a corner with Prisoners of Azkaban, and after a minute or so of wondering at having his daughter, the light of his life, the thing he thought he’d forsaken decades ago, went to wander around the store. He’d developed quite the taste for Terry Pratchett in his last 28 years of isolation.

“Can I help you with anything?” someone said behind him.

Jefferson froze. That voice. It was so familiar. He turned around slowly. There she was standing. Alice. His Alice. In reality. Not a figment of his madness. Not some strange, lovely, made up girl. Alice, real and alive. She looked almost as shocked as he felt.

“Alice?” he said, just to make sure.

“Oh my god, Jefferson!” She ran up and threw her arms around him. He froze and tried not to hyperventilate in the intense relief of the moment before he came to his senses and scooped her up into a hug. She still smelled the same, like fresh tea and old books, something warm and comforting and familiar. He laughed, giddy with it.

“I can’t believe it’s really you. When the curse happened, I woke up in an insane asylum, and I didn’t know- everything was- you’re real!” She pulled back to look at him, smiled so wide and bright. Jefferson cupped her face and wiped away her tears with his thumb. “You’re really here,” she said. “I thought that I was alone.”

He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t do anything but smile helplessly at the only thing that had ever seemed real in the world besides his daughter. She let out a huff of breath, and then a stifled laugh, and then they were both clutching at each other, laughing hysterically and kissing, sudden and unplanned and perfect.

“It’s Belle, actually,” she said suddenly, leaning back just far enough to speak.

“What?” He withdrew a hand from her waist to retrieve a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped more tears from her face.

“My name – it’s Belle. Belle of Oraia,” she said.

“Well, Belle of Oraia, my daughter Grace and I are going to have a tea party after this, if you’d like to join us?”

“I’d love to,” she said with a smile.


End file.
